I’m always looking for great plugins for wordpress that can help your online business and recently I came accross one that I must say I have fallen in love with. So much so that I am strongly considering purchasing the pro option for this plugin.  I have been on the internet for almost 4 years now.  Whether it was blogging for just the fun of it or starting my business I realized that I needed a way to track what was going on with my website.  I wanted to know who was visiting, where they were coming from, what they were reading and so much.  And to be honest, in my earlier years I was really just concerned about the numbers.  How many people were visiting my site, how many subscribed to my rss feed?  I thought these would make me a better blogger.  So to help me keep track of my progress and my growth I opened up a google analytics account (free) and it told me everything I needed to know.  The only problem was some of these numbers really didn’t mean anything to me.  I didn’t have any goals, and no way of measuring what “campaign” was working.  So I set some goals and the next thing I did seems so primitive now but it’s what I thought was the best way of doing it.  I would create multiple pages of the same exact page but each page had a different url. Don’t quite get it?  Well let me give you an example.

Are You Tracking Your Marketing Efforts?

Let’s look at an opt-in offer.  I had at least 3 different ways for people to opt-in to that same offer.  One was from a squeeze page, the next was from my sidebar, and the other one was from my pop-up box or lightbox.  Now each one had their own separate form that I made in AWeber which gave analytics on each form, but I also created 3 different thank you pages so that I know which form was converting more.  Each page has the same exact contact but the url was different.  So it would be something like www.yourdomainname.com/sidebar, www.yourdomain.com/lightbox, just so I knew the difference. Imagine doing something like this for every singe campaign you have, and there are many different types.  This could become quite confusing and possible slow down your site with unnecessary pages.  Well in come Pretty Links plugin for wordpress to the rescue.

I’m always skeptical about the use of a lot of plugins.  Also there are so many different kinds out there you never really know which one is the best one to use.  Well in the mentorship group (you should be apart of one or have a mentor if you are in business) this plugin was introduced. I really didn’t know or understand what it would do, and besides my way of doing things was working just fine (if it ain’t broke why fix it, right?).  But I went ahead and gave it a try.  And needless to say it was exactly what I wanted and needed.  All of the things I was was doing manually I could now do with this plugin.  For example, remember the multiple thank you pages I created for that one opt-in offer? Well now I simply needed on page and using pretty link pro I could create multiple links for that one page.  I even created links for pages that I wanted to specifically used on my social media outlets.

How Does it work?

So how does pretty links work.  I’ll show you.  First login into your wordpress site and click plugins located in the left sidebar.  The click add new at the top and search for pretty links.  Once it comes up you want to install it (Remember: prior to installing any plugin please back-up your website). Now that you have it installed you can go to that left menu again and look for Pretty Link, it has a star icon.  When you click it you have the option to add new link.  But before you add a new link, please decided what it is you are tracking? What are you looking for? Are you tracking opt-in conversion? Is this a pay-per-click campaign? In order for this to be effective you need to really figure out what you are tracking, and what is your goal.  You also need to have the link ready.

Now that we have your goal, and your link it’s time to create a tracking link:

1. Click Pretty Link from the left menu
2. Then add your target url. Your target URL is the page url of the page you want to track (a domain name is – www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com, a url is http://www.yourdomain.com or http://yourdomain.com).
3. You want to now create your pretty link url.  As you can see from the image above it will start out with your domain name and you can add whatever you want to the end.  Please make sure this is recognizable for you.
4. Please be sure to give your url a title so you can quickly identify it in the pretty link dashboard.
5. The click create.

Now for today’s article I’m not going to get into groups or any other advance options.  With what you have above you can go ahead and get started on tracking your campaigns.  I bet you can also use pretty link to create redirects for your affiliate links instead of using cpanel.  If you’d like I’d be willing to create a quick tutorial for you so you can see how it works.  Be sure to comment below to let me know if you would be interested in that.

Felicia Pratt is an author, WordPress Enthusiast and a Social Media Fanatic that supports women entrepreneurs who run their business online. She helps them streamline, automate, and build their online presence so they can increase their visibility and provide consistency in their branding and marketing efforts. Through various entrepreneurial endeavors including Real Estate, and the travel industry, Felicia has finally found her niche empowering women by helping them manage their time effectively and creating a work-life balance that works for them.